You Were Wrong (3 page)

THREE

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS
after a slab of ice the size of France had made the beach he now woke up on in sodden clothes, Karl assessed the feel of having had all but a thin crust of flesh, hair, and skin scraped out of him by Stony and whatever series of people and events—now compressed into a red, wet bolus of vague sense memory—had come after Stony in the night. The beach and Karl were alike in being relatively young yet colonized, built upon, much used, depleted, and temporary. Where was his hat? Someone had stolen his hat. An individual or group of individuals had absconded with his head covering. A man of Karl’s light skin and facial challenges would do well to have something useful on his head of a late spring day, and he had done a good job of keeping his on his on the whole trip till now—well, not till now but till a time between his last moment of knowing he had it and now, and he hoped that moment would be returned to him just as he hoped his hat would, especially as the location of the two—time and hat—likely were connected. The hat was soft and of a faded yellow that could not have been arrived at by manufacture. The brim was stiff enough to keep the sun off, but not so stiff as to jut militarily ahead of him into the world. The band had an orange tartan pattern unrelated to Karl’s people, who were from the Balkans. The whole effect was of an inoffensively monstrous and immortal daffodil. Where was his hat? Where was the house? Where was a car, a road, a tree to give him shade? Where was Karl himself? Sitting, not yet ready to stand, on a hot beach with low and mostly dead scrub brush, the horizon either distant or obscured. Dead brown sea things had been cast up everywhere on the shore, a rough night for the beach as for Karl. What was his shoe situation? Moistened and sand-filled.

“Dude!” someone said—Arv, he deduced. Till now, Karl had hoped one of the modest consolations of being a pariah would be to complete life never having been called “dude.” “I’ve got gatorade.” Arv put the jar to Karl’s lips. The substance’s sugary disgustingness flooded him, ran down his chin and onto his chest, where its bright and indelible dye made a stain on his off-white shirt. “Don’t be uptight about the shirt”: Arv. Arv’s face right now, all up in Karl’s, unknowingly explained to Karl why anyone would ever want to punch anyone’s face. And yet however it might simplify one’s life to do so, one could not discount even Arv. Did not the row of retail shops on Main Street kneel for Arv as for all humanity after two shots of tequila at The Dinghy? He now walked too fast along the beach, squat, furry, curly-haired, hunching forward into life, feet splayed at right angles when he took each step as if they had argued and would go their separate ways.

“Would you please slow down, Arv?” Arv smelled, no worse than Karl, but Arv had slept indoors. “Where are we going, Arv?”

“People like to put it at the end like that with that little free-floating sarcasm, ‘Where are we going,
Arv
?’ like my name itself is the punch line of a joke.” Arv in his quotation had made his face look beat up à la Karl and had done well too with Karl’s high and reedy voice. “People think I’m just a clown,” he said, and reprised last night’s
dentice
performance.

“Rough night?” Karl asked.

“The usual. How about you?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you always do that?”

“Do what?”

Arv smiled. “It’s all right, no one gets to stop being lonely without being violated. Breakfast?”

“I don’t see a building anywhere.”

“See that parking lot over there, and that car?”

He saw his own old golden Volvo, abandoned, door open, on a small patch of sandy black asphalt. “Did I leave that there like that?”

“No.”

“You’re driving my car now?”

“We’re pretty communal, down at the House. Maybe you’re not ready to be one of us yet but you sure acted like it last night. Do you find
Volvo
has a dirty ring to it?”

“‘The House’? ‘One of us’? Is this a cult?”

Arv laughed and slapped Karl’s shoulder three times. Karl felt fraternal sympathy with someone who, not sure how to be a man, hoped the use of manhood’s physical forms would help.

Arv pulled him along toward the car. “Sylvia told us about your situation. Maybe we can help you with it.”

“What situation?”

“You still look thirsty. You want some water?”

“Yes, please.”

Arv gave him a mauve and translucent plastic water jar whose screw top was attached to its neck by a bendable plastic armature, as children’s mittens are attached to their coat sleeves. The jar looked to be communal and of questionable cleanliness. Karl thought of pouring the water into his mouth so the jar wouldn’t touch his lips, but drank the normal way. “What situation?”

“You know, the house you live in.”

“My house?”

“Ownership is burdensome.”

“Have you ever owned anything?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not talking about a toothbrush.” As he said this, it occurred to him with horror that these people shared a toothbrush.

“I was once in danger of owning something big that my parents were going to give me,” Arv said, “but I successfully avoided it.”

“How did you avoid it?”

“By being disowned.”

“Why?”

“The usual reason middle-class parents disown their son. Have some more water.”

“I’m good.” Karl was not good. Sand was deep in the gelatinous fabric of his facial scabs. His cranium was a helmet of bone two sizes too small for his brain. His shoes chafed, his legs ached as if he’d run all night, his back was in knots, he smelled like anchovies and rotting pineapple. They arrived at his car.

“You want to drive?” Arv said.

“You’re asking me if I want to drive my own car?”

“If you like.”

“You drive it.”

Karl lay faceup in the far back of the Volvo station wagon. His knees were bent and his head rested uncomfortably in the angle made by the back of the backseat and the back inner wall of the car on the driver’s side. Arv was a terrible driver—people often are in other people’s cars—but Karl couldn’t be bothered to voice his thoughts on this fact, or notice it. Jouncing along above the soft and pitted beachfront road, Karl gazed up at the treetops and the clouds. A cloudy day. Whom did he love best, his mom, his dad, his sis, his bro? He had no mom, no dad, no sis, no bro. His friends? He hadn’t heard the word. His home? He’d never been home. Money? He hated it as he hated God. What, then, did he love? He loved the clouds…the passing clouds…up there…up there…

Squared-off building tops cut into the sky. The Shadow’s Rest Motel, the Spy Store, piano store, billiard hall, wireless shop for all your wireless needs, paper goods, check cashing, dry cleaning, furniture, jewelry, dresses, drugs, ice cream, produce, pizza, day care, gas, law: a town.

Arv parked at the gas station, whose cashier stood on the far side of an old screen door light on its hinges in a one-story building with a half-peeled-off green paint job. They passed the cashier and entered a dark room with small café tables. Half a dozen big and lazy flies cycled one by one in and out of hearing range and view. Voices from the darkness called Karl’s name. “It’s alive!” someone said who must have been Stony.

And then her form swam in from the gloom. She wore a different shirt today, of a blue taken from the sky he’d seen from the car, and pants of black, softer than before, and flip-flops, dirty toes exposed, chipped black polish on the nails. He knew faces could say more than their owners knew and he wanted her face to tell him what he didn’t have the words to ask her. The face of Vetch in the semidark, its soft white nostrils, their one or two blown capillaries, the roseate glow, blue eyes obscured even when the lids were up, an understated choker at her neck holding up a stone or coin; would she speak to him? He liked her better nervous; she didn’t seem so now.

“Vetch,” he said.

“How’s the burglary, Floor?”

“Up yours.”

“So he
does
remember what he did last night,” Arv said.

She looked at Arv as if he were an additional fly. There was the unsettled question of whether her intentions toward Karl were mean or nice, whose answer would not influence his feelings, only their consequences. He sat in an old-fashioned folding chair of metal frame and wooden slats, also painted green, also peeling, as was the round table. Two of the others, Jen and Rich, he felt, were there. He did not at first hear the conversation, but listened to the music of the initiates’ understated mirth.

“Karl needs a big breakfast,” Stony said, after a time. How did everything he said sound like an insult?

“My wallet is gone.” He was not sure if he’d just discovered this or had known it for some time.

“Your credit is good here.”

Karl looked at Sylvia, who said, “We didn’t take your wallet!”

Stony, who always looked as if he’d just been given a massage, said, “Don’t yell at Karl, he’s in pain,” and went to order Karl his food. Arv, handicapped with eyebrows and a mouth formed for wit, excused himself, as did Rich and Jen, if that’s who they were. Sylvia stood up as well. Karl positioned himself in his chair to say the words “Don’t go,” but couldn’t make them come.

“Come with me,” she said. He went, tethered to mistrust, out into a luminous garden behind the gas station, and then into a woods behind that, unremembered pleasure still half-wheeling in his brain. He had drunk of potent wines last night, and perhaps had found himself for an hour among the valiant of voluptuousness. He walked in this small, wild forest, Sylvia strong and thoughtful at his side. A vise clamped down on his own thoughts, and tightened.

“Cat got your mouth?” she said.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the house.”

“What about breakfast?”

“It will be delivered. Jen runs the café today.”

“Who runs it other days?”

“Jan, or Rich, or Steve, or me, or—”

“What is your purpose?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“What is the purpose of you, this group, what are you?”

“What are
you
?”

“What were you doing in my house?”

“Man, Floor, would you cut it out? I like you, you’re…odd, and…sad. Look at your hair. Come here a sec.”

They stood in the dark forest, the sun far away. A little chestnut bird flew by while others, in the trees, sang a melancholy song. Salt air cooled their skin and they shivered. Again her pale face glowed, absent an explicable light source, and her full, soft lips came toward him while staying still. She reached out a hand and he stepped back.

“Hold still.”

“What are you doing?”

“Fixing your hair.”

“Is it broken?”

“Karl!”

“Don’t touch my face.”

“I won’t.”

She fixed it, yanked it a little, her unruly boy.

“Now,” she said, “I’d like to hug you.”

“Why?”

“No reason.”

“No.”